I came across another interesting web 2.0 app recently. It’s called Kindling and it allows users to submit an idea, discuss it and then vote on it. From the companies website…
“Kindling makes it easy for your group to submit, discuss and vote on ideas. Good ideas naturally rise to the top helping your business or organization uncover brilliance that might otherwise go unnoticed”
Similar applications have been creatively used by Starbucks (MyStarbucksidea) and Dell (Ideastorm) to collect customer ideas. Kindling brings the concept inside the organization.
Here’s a video describing the application:
Introducing Kindling from Arc90 on Vimeo.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/2900713]
Learning applications
From an organizational learning perspective, the tool offers a lot of interesting possibilities. A few that come to mind:
- Team decision making. For years group facilitators have taken teams through flipchart based consensus and voting exercises for group decision making (markers and stickers for everyone!). This tool can automate that that process for groups and organization wide application.
- Suggestion systems are still commonplace in many companies. Kindling is a suggestion system for the knowledge-based company.
- Problem solving for continuous improvement. Any company involved in continuous improvement or process re-design work can use the tool to identify causes and fixes.
- Voice of the Customer. Customers (internal and external) always have needs and wants for what you produce. Using this tool they can submit ideas or you can provide ideas for them to vote on and discuss in small groups or large aggregates.
- Similarly it could be used for learning needs identification and program evaluation
I have a feeling web 2.0 applications like Kindling and Rypple (for performance feedback, I discussed here and here) that meet specific communication needs in organizations and can be used to transform existing processes are going to get quick traction.
Update: June 30/09
I came across a public application for idea ranking today. Check out UserVoice. It has scaled pricing but you can use it for free depending on the number of “votes” you need.
